The Golden Steves: the good alternative to the Oscars

My nephew Steven, a film buff about to get his master’s in film at Columbia, annually nominates his picks for the “Golden Steve” awards, which he humbly describes thusly:

Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics.Impervious to bribery, unreceptive to ballyhoo, disgusted by sentiment and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might legitimately be termed “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 160 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. Winners will be announced Saturday, January 28th.

Of his “best picture” awards, I’ve seen but two (my moviegoing has been scant this year): “Certified Copy” and “The Tree of Life”. As I’ve posted before, I find the first one brilliant and the second execrable. We’ve of course had huge arguments about “The Tree of Life,” but he’s recalcitrant.

Uhg. I can’t believe I sat through the whole thing. Two plus hours of execrable experimental babble. Another boring and long winded homage to directorial ego.

The film is pretty to look at, yet getting through it is a task imposed on the viewer, like a long slide show you are forced to sit through at the house of a relative.

Even one of the stars, Shawn Penn, said that it needed a traditional narrative structure to make it work–that he saw compelling emotion in the script but none on the screen. I just didn’t care about anybody in the film. No connection with any of the characters. And god as a colored ink blob in a water tank just didn’t do it for me.

If Penn feels that way, I wonder what he (and you) would make of Kubrick’s 2001, both as an abstract narrative and a cosmic meditation. I guess “god as a colored ink blob” is one reading of TOL, but having seen it twice I still find no irrefutable textual evidence of god. For me it’s more about human memory and philosophical dualities. Either way; with apologies to Whitman, it’s large and contains multitudes.

I just finished watching The Tree of Life and it is a beautiful film, especially the baby sequence, but I did not feel any love from the movie, it did not speak to me, but rather to the Director’s own fetishisms for 50s America and his religion.

Fair enough, but you should know that I (the composer of the list) am second to none in my regard for Mr. von Sydow. This performance didn’t make the grade for me, but many prior ones have. Three years ago I nominated two Swedish movies for best foreign film — illegal under Academy rules, and indeed the Oscars haven’t nominated one since 2004.

Alas, you must not love it enough to know that this is a “website” and most certainly not a “blog” (in spite of meeting the definition of blog used for the Bloggies ;-> Being a website with entries organized by date).

You teach other people to get masters degrees in film. And it becomes closed loop (much as theology and philosophy do, leading to jobs for horrible people like Joseph R. Hoffman.) Which is why I decided to skip postgraduate work like that.

In film making and video production, nobody cares what degrees you have, they only care what your body of work is and who you know. In finance, they may care, but not so much on the production or post production side.

I was simply mesmerised by “The Tree of Life”. I couldn’t even go for a coffee break during the whole two and a half hours. At the end my son, who wondered by every now and then (he’d watched it earlier), just shook his head in disbelief. He neither understood nor liked the movie at all. I was able to explain to him the things he did not understand but he still thought it was rubbish.
(I didn’t see god anywhere, though, but that just might be my bias showing)